The words 'underground' and 'underfund' are the only words that begin and end with the letters 'und'.

If I get to leave my office to go out into the field, does that make me undeskbound?

Sure, but that just means I get to report you to Fringe Division as a spy from that alternate universe with the blimps. Don't worry though, I hear they only terminate shapeshifters with extreme prejudice.

Containers with mead have been found to date back to before containers of beer.

Containers with beer have been found to date back to before containers with bread.

The first grain domesticated was barley, for making beer.

The Codes of Hammurabi have a least one law pertaining to beer, which at the time was made by the women of the household.

When Louis Pasteur discovered microbes and the pasteurization process, he was studying beer, not milk.

Before they used hops, a substance called grout was required for use in all beer made in England, it's recipe was a secret as it was used as the means for taxing beer consumption at the time. The recipe is now lost to time.

The reason Guinness was the biggest selling beer in Ireland was because it had the lowest alcohol content and was there for the cheapest. The level of alcohol dictated the tax on the liquid. When shipped to America and places like that, the alcohol content was upped.

Actually the process of making Alcohol requires the ability to spoil. Most mead brewers must add water to the honey so it can spoil.

And here I always thought it was because the yeast converts the sugars in the honey, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The sugars can not be converted until it is diluted to the point were it can go bad. It is the breaking down of the structure that allows it to be converted.

Weird, none of my homebrewing books say that. With malted barley used in the production of beer you do use water and heat during the mashing process to convert the starches in the barley to the sugars the yeast will convert. But I always understood that the honey already contained the necessary sugars.

As the Quartermaster General for the Continental Army during the Civil War, Montgomery Cunningham Meigs was responsible for transporting troops and maintaining supply lines for the entire army.

Meigs was also a hardcore Unionist. Even though he was originally from Georgia, he despised any officers who resigned from the U.S. Army to serve in the Confederate Army. One such officer was Colonel Robert E. Lee, who left behind a prestigious 35-year military career to fight for the South and (in case you slept your way through 12 years of grade school) eventually became the Commanding General of the entire Confederate Army.

At the time of his defection, Lee and his wife lived in a mansion called Arlington House, located on a 1,100-acre estate in Virginia. Lee told his wife to flee, which was somewhat of a wise move, because the land was overrun by Union forces less than a month later. Citing failure to pay taxes, the government eventually seized the estate which we assume Lee had left filled with Home Alone-style boobie traps.

By 1864, as casualties mounted to the hundreds of thousands, military cemeteries were quickly filling up. This is when Quartermaster General Meigs stepped in with the biggest "f!*~ you" of all to his former colleague -- he recommended that Arlington be established as the Army's newest cemetery. His proposal was accepted, and his first order of business was to bury the bodies of 26 Union soldiers in Mrs. Lee's prized rose garden. By the end of the war, more than 5,000 soldiers had been buried there, all for the purpose of preventing Lee from returning to his old home.

And the plan worked. Not wanting to stir up further animosity with the government -- and presumably hoping to avoid angry Union zombies -- Lee never challenged for the return of his land.

It wasn't until 1870 that Lee's son, George Washington Curtis Lee, successfully sued for the return of the estate, immediately selling it back to the government for $150,000 (or around $3.5 million in today's dollars). The Arlington House has since been restored and is now considered a historic building. Meanwhile, the 300,000 gravestones dotting the grounds of what is now Arlington National Cemetery will forever represent the giant, corpse-filled middle finger of Quartermaster General Meigs.

23 years after basically declaring that every football fan in the city of Liverpool was a low-life piece of scum, former editor of The Sun, Kelvin McKenzie, apologises by basically declaring that: I just wrote down what these other people* told me, so it wasn't actually my fault that I said you were urinating on corpses and stealing their stuff.

Halley's comet passes the Earth every 76 years (the next time it will return will be 2062).

Actually it's more accurate to say that Halley's crosses Earth's orbit every 76 years. On it's last close approach it was on the other side of the sun from Earth, so it's passage wasn't nearly as spectacular as it was in Mark Twain's time.

My grandmother used to put out this big nativity spread on a counter every Christmas. All kinds of cotton ball snow, a little plastic light-up village, an outsized wooden manger and these weathered old figurines. If you've seen enough Catholic kitsch you can probably picture the lot. Big part of my Christmas memories from childhood. But we're Polish, so her nativity never had a caganer.

A what? A dude in the back that's got his pants down, dropping deuce.I'm not making this up. They're a traditional part of nativity scenes in Catalonia especially, but also parts of Portugal and Italy.

Yes I read the article. That same strand of DNA stores all the data needed to construct a Human being which I believe dwarfs that amount. That's one of the problems of building a Star Trek type transporter, you simply can't contain enough information to reconstruct a human body.

If a DC 10 processed fuel with the same efficiency as a hummingbird, it would cross the Gulf of Mexico on one gallon of gasoline. The United States once tried to get Mount Etna to erupt by bombing it. It didn't work.

My grandmother used to put out this big nativity spread on a counter every Christmas. All kinds of cotton ball snow, a little plastic light-up village, an outsized wooden manger and these weathered old figurines. If you've seen enough Catholic kitsch you can probably picture the lot. Big part of my Christmas memories from childhood. But we're Polish, so her nativity never had a caganer.

A what? A dude in the back that's got his pants down, dropping deuce.I'm not making this up. They're a traditional part of nativity scenes in Catalonia especially, but also parts of Portugal and Italy.

My grandparents are from Catalunya as well, so the caganer is part of the family tradition.

The idea is to hide the caganer, since the guy is supposed to have been unable to keep his bowels quiet and just had to go. The fun was in trying to find them. My uncles would make different types of caganer and hide them all over my grandparent's house for Christmas, so it was like an Easter Egg hunt, but slightly less decent.

I've always wondered where does this Catalá obsession with things pooping themselves comes from, though. Then again, its been a running joke in the family for a long time, since Catalá are also said to be extremely stingy, and since here in Chile "cagado" is slang for stingy, well, it kind of gives itself into the stereotype (or as my mother says "Why don't Catalá babies come down when thrown upwards? Because they'll be grasping the chandeliers. I'm sure you still have some uncles no one know about hanging around your grandmother's house").

More Did-Yuo-Konows:

-Spanish is not technically Spanish, but Castilian, the tongue of the former Iberian kindgom of Castille ("Land of Castles"). The term "Spanish" only came into official use during the government of Franco (after the Spanish Civil War), as the idea was to create a sense of unity in an otherwise highly disparraged group of nations, by calling the most used tongue -Castillian- the Tongue of All Spaniards.

-Chile is the only country to list its official language as "Castillian" rather than "Spanish". It is thought this is due to basque influences, as about 25% of the population has roots in that culture.

-In the Argentinian Patagonia, Welsh is still recognized as an official language, with over 25,000 locals who speak it as their first language.

-The capital of the Principality of Monaco, Monaco, is bigger than the country itself.

-Spanish is not technically Spanish, but Castilian, the tongue of the former Iberian kindgom of Castille ("Land of Castles"). The term "Spanish" only came into official use during the government of Franco (after the Spanish Civil War), as the idea was to create a sense of unity in an otherwise highly disparraged group of nations, by calling the most used tongue -Castillian- the Tongue of All Spaniards.

Such efforts included brutal suppression of other languages and cultures such as Catalan and Barcelonan. Franco was not a good thing for the diversity of Spanish culture.

My grandmother used to put out this big nativity spread on a counter every Christmas. All kinds of cotton ball snow, a little plastic light-up village, an outsized wooden manger and these weathered old figurines. If you've seen enough Catholic kitsch you can probably picture the lot. Big part of my Christmas memories from childhood. But we're Polish, so her nativity never had a caganer.

A what? A dude in the back that's got his pants down, dropping deuce.I'm not making this up. They're a traditional part of nativity scenes in Catalonia especially, but also parts of Portugal and Italy.

My grandmother used to put out this big nativity spread on a counter every Christmas. All kinds of cotton ball snow, a little plastic light-up village, an outsized wooden manger and these weathered old figurines. If you've seen enough Catholic kitsch you can probably picture the lot. Big part of my Christmas memories from childhood. But we're Polish, so her nativity never had a caganer.

A what? A dude in the back that's got his pants down, dropping deuce.I'm not making this up. They're a traditional part of nativity scenes in Catalonia especially, but also parts of Portugal and Italy.

Although according to the Wikipedia page they can move backwards and the reason they were picked is because of their size...

The Red Kangaroo and Emu that support the shield are the unofficial animal emblems of the nation. They owe this recognition to the fact that they are native Australian fauna, (found only on that continent), and likely chosen because they are the most well-known native Australian animals large enough to be positioned together in scale holding up the shield. It is often claimed these animals were chosen because neither animal can move backward, only forward - i.e. progress. In reality both animals can move backwards, but infrequently do. In the background is a wreath of Golden Wattle, the official national floral emblem, though the representation of the species is not botanically accurate.[1] At the bottom of the coat of arms is a scroll that contains the name of the nation. Neither the wreath of wattle nor the scroll are technically part of the official design described on the Royal Warrant that grants the armorial design.

Lemmings do not throw themselves over cliffs to drown in mass suicides. The whole thing was made up for the 1958 Disney "documentary" White Wilderness. To get the shot, which was filmed in Alberta, Canada and has no outlet to the sea, a guy with a large board pushed a bunch of lemmings off a short embankment so that it looked like they were all swan diving to a watery grave.

Lemmings do not throw themselves over cliffs to drown in mass suicides. The whole thing was made up for the 1958 Disney "documentary" White Wilderness. To get the shot, which was filmed in Alberta, Canada and has no outlet to the sea, a guy with a large board pushed a bunch of lemmings off a short embankment so that it looked like they were all swan diving to a watery grave.

Lemmings do not throw themselves over cliffs to drown in mass suicides. The whole thing was made up for the 1958 Disney "documentary" White Wilderness. To get the shot, which was filmed in Alberta, Canada and has no outlet to the sea, a guy with a large board pushed a bunch of lemmings off a short embankment so that it looked like they were all swan diving to a watery grave.

Damn you, I wanted that to be true! You just ruined my day.

On the other hand, it does give some support to this: The Disney Corporation is evil. ;)

There was a problem, in the 19th century, involving people being buried alive (comas and unconsciousness being mistaken for death). The solution? Patented coffins with bells. You wake up 6 feet under, ring the bell and a passerby or the nice folk from the Society for Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead (a real society!) will help you out. Hence, one of the possible origins for the idiom "saved by the bell".

The TV show "Saved by the Bell" was originally called "Good Morning Miss Bliss" and focused on the teacher Miss Bliss, staring Hayley Mills in the title role. It included most if not all of the same characters and actors but was in Indianapolis, not Bayside.

The alias used by Salman Rushdie until 2002, when hiding following ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against him, was made up of the first names of two of his favourite writers: Joseph (Conrad)and Anton (Tjechov).

In 2001 Vatican Secret archive historian Barbara Frale found the long lost Chinon parchment which detailed the trail for heresy of Jacques De Molay and the Templars. It was on the wrong shelf for about 400 years.